Unions and Citizens: Membership Status and Political Rights in the Scotland, the UK and the EU

Stephen Richard — Sun, 26 Sep 2021 07:04:36 +0000

Primary Author or Creator

Shaw

Stephen Richard Sun, 09/26/2021 - 08:04

Additional Author(s) / Creators

University of Edinburgh

Date Published

Sat, 03/05/2016 - 12:00

Category

Independence

Type of Resource

Academic Paper

Length (Pages, words, minutes etc...)

26pp

Fast Facts

This chapter makes use of the lenses of citizenship to explore the interaction between the two dimensions of ‘troubled membership’. It locates legal change in its broader political context and focuses on contested boundaries of polity membership. This explores the content of a possible future Scottish citizenship, and examines the formal legal membership and political citizenship in respect of both the Scottish referendum and the UK’s referendum on EU membership. The threads are drawn together in a discussion of how the EU referendum outcomes may impact upon the issue at the heart of the Scottish referendum debate, namely the ongoing viability of the UK as a union state.

More details

This chapter makes use of the lenses of citizenship to explore the interaction between the two dimensions of ‘troubled membership’. It applies a law-and-politics approach, which locates legal change in its broader political context and focuses on the contestation of the boundaries of polity membership. After setting the scene (Section 2), the chapter explores the content of a possible future Scottish citizenship regime (Section 3) and then examines the intertwining of formal legal membership and political citizenship in respect of both the Scottish referendum and the UK’s referendum on EU membership (Section 4). The threads are drawn together in the conclusions (Section 5) through a discussion of how the EU referendum outcomes may impact upon the issue at the heart of the Scottish referendum debate, namely the ongoing viability of the UK as a union state.

In the book: C. Closa (ed.), Secession from a Member State and Withdrawal from the European Union: Troubled Membership, Cambridge University Press, 2016, Forthcoming, Edinburgh School of Law Research Paper No. 2016/05, Europa Working Paper No 2016/03,

Resource Address (URL)

https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2742526

Keywords

Language English